Creating Subsidized Employment Opportunities for Low-Income Parents: The Legacy of the TANF Emergency Fund

This paper presents the results of a telephone survey of the subsidized employment programs funded all or in part with funds from the TANF EF, conducted by staff from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) and the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) during the summer and fall of 2010. We collected this information with two goals in mind: (1) to understand how states used the flexibility they were given to design and implement subsidized employment programs and what challenges they faced in getting them up and running, and (2) to provide a written record of states’ experiences that could be used to inform future efforts. We targeted our data collection efforts to the 33 states operating employment programs that served adults. We were successful in conducting telephone interviews with 30 of the states and gathered basic information from written documents from the other states. During the interviews, we obtained information on the populations that states decided to serve, how they structured their wage subsidies, the types of jobs they provided, how they operated their programs, how many individuals were employed, and their plans to continue programs after the end of the EF. 5